It was found out that allophones of vowel phonemes /i/ and /e/, surrounded by palatalized consonants, differed significantly in their duration, though their openness – the major articulator correlate of inherent vowel duration (IVD) – was practically the same. It is hypothesized that duration contrast between [i] and [e] is controlled by speakers of Russian to set off the lack of spectral disti...

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for Spoken Dialogue Management Jason D. Williams The design of robust spoken dialog systems is a significant research challenge. Speech recognition errors are common and hence the state of the conversation can never be known with certainty, and users can react in a variety of ways making deterministic forward planning impossible. This thesis argues...

Two experiments on same-different vowel discrimination are reported. In each, the main variable was the duration of a silent delay between the two items being judged. As would be expected from the assumption that such judgements depend at least partly on auditory sensory memory, longer delays led to poorer discrimination than shorter delays. The auditory memory loss seems to be asymptotic at ab...

The efficiency of chromatic and luminance signals was studied in a set of tasks requiring the discrimination of two colors. Discrimination was measured around an adapting achromatic light and a number of other points in a three-dimensional color space. As a baseline, discrimination thresholds were measured under conditions permitting a side-by-side comparison of stimuli in space or time. For th...

To construct a coherent percept of the world, the brain continuously combines information across multiple sensory modalities. Simple stimuli from different modalities are usually assumed to be processed in distinct brain areas. However, there is growing evidence that simultaneous stimulation of multiple modalities can influence the activity in unimodal sensory areas and improve or impair perfor...

In this paper, we test the effect of using speech synthesis when interacting with a spoken dialog system (SDS). We use a user simulation to connect our speech synthesis to a real, state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) component deployed in a working commercial SDS via a standard telephone line. In a series of experiments, we compare human-machine dialogs and their recognition scor...

Speech audiometry is a method for assessing the ability of the auditory system using speech sounds as stimuli. A list of phonemically balanced bisyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (c-v-c-v) Malay words was produced. All the bisyllabic words (c-v-c-v) thought to be commonly used in everyday conversations were listed from the Dewan Bahasa dictionary and their suitability assessed. The chose...

Recent theories posit that adult neurogenesis supports dentate gyrus pattern separation and hence is necessary for some types of discrimination learning. Using an inducible transgenic mouse model, we investigated the contribution of adult-born neurons to spatial and nonspatial touch-screen discriminations of varying levels of difficulty. Arresting neurogenesis caused a modest but statistically ...